Towler turns up Tory heat in Kelvin

From European Voice's Entre-Nous column

5/7/03, 5:00 PM CET

Updated 4/23/14, 8:25 PM CET

Gawain Towler, the former MEP’s assistant who co-edits Brussels’ satirical/libellous website The Sprout, managed to increase the Conservative share of the vote by a staggering 0.28% when he stood for a Glasgow seat in the Scottish Assembly elections on 1 May.

Despite being roundly trounced by a Labour candidate in the working class Kelvin district, Towler reckons his 1,816 votes amounted to a moral victory. But best of all, he managed to finish ahead of the Greens (quite an achievement for a Scottish Tory). Said Towler: “The tide has turned for the Tories in Scotland. Or maybe that was just the rain…”

Across the rest of the UK, the Conservatives won back hundreds of local council seats from Labour.

There is something splendidly parochial about the state-aid investigation launched last week by the European Commission’s competition department into JC Decaux, a French advertising company. The question …